Abstract:
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused unusual conflicts all over the world in every industry.
Containment measures, which are being adapted to reduce the spread of the virus, have
threatened the general perception of employees’ job security. This study is aimed at evaluating
job security perception among private-sector employees in Sri Lanka during the COVID-19
pandemic, Sri Lanka, has faced several strict containment measures such as lockdowns and
travel restrictions. Based on the objective, an online questionnaire was circulated among the
respondents via email and social media. Snowballing sampling was used as the sampling
technique, and finally, 100 responses were collected. Three measures were used to assess job
security perceptions: threats to the overall job, threats to job features, and powerlessness. The
collected data were analysed descriptively and statistically. The Kruskal-Wallis test was used
to evaluate the impact of socio-demographic characteristics on perceived job security before
and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Gender was the only factor that had an impact as a threat
to the total job during the COVID-19 pandemic, and there were no other socio-demographic
variables that significantly impacted job security before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Spearman correlation was used to analyse the correlation between socio-demographic
variables and job security perception measures. There was a weak negative correlation with
the type of employment and threats to the total job (-0.243) before the COVID-19 pandemic.
There was a weak positive correlation between gender and the threats to the total job (0.207)
during the COVID-19 pandemic. Wilcoxon signed-rank test was used to compare the ordinal
paired observations between groups, including job security perception measurements before
the COVID-19 pandemic and during the COVID-19 pandemic. From the selected job security
perception measurements, threats to the total and powerlessness have significantly changed
during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study explores the factors that have to be considered
by private sector companies in Sri Lanka during similar kinds of pandemic situations in the
future to enhance job security issues among their employees.
